The Gaming Month Ahead – August 2014

August this year brings a number of remastered titles, a lot of Vita love, Diablo 3 on consoles and Wasteland 2 coming out of Early Access. Sacred 3 and Risen 3: Titan Lords dominate the first half of the month. Both titles come to PC and 7th gen consoles, but are conspicuously absent from 8th gen. Sacred 3 returns to the main series after the brief 2d side-scroller, Sacred Citadel, which acts as a prologue to the new title. Sacred 3 changes lots of the old classes, adding new ones like Lancer and Safiri Warrior. It also features 4-player co-op, which teams the player up with 3 AI when not playing with fellow humans. Risen 3 meanwhile eschews the pirate setting of Risen 2 and returns to the first game’s more medieval locale. It seems a strange choice and just makes Risen blend in with other RPG’s, rather than standing out as a pirate themed adventure, as the second one did.

8th gen is largely serviced this month by remasters and ports – Diablo 3, Metro Redux, Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate, and The Last of Us Remastered. It’s not a bad line up, though if you’ve played them all before, you might feel a little hungry for new stuff this month, especially for XBone users. Ultra Street Fighter IV meanwhile comes out now as a stand alone on consoles (not just the digital DLC that was released weeks ago) and also comes to PC as stand alone and upgrade for SS4AE.

Elsewhere, the Vita gets quite a number of releases, like Disagaea 4 and Hyperdimension Neptunia Rebirth. The WiiU ship keeps on sinking, with no new releases this month, while the 3DS gets only one or two titles. Either way, its next month that we’ll start seeing some of the bigger titles of the year, like Destiny.